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Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Central Bankers: A blind guide dog

‘Forward guidance’ is the central bank buzz-word. Three of the top
four central banks in the world have now officially adopted it. And the
fourth has already made it very clear where its monetary policy is
going. Forward guidance is an attempt by the leading central banks to
indicate more clearly what monetary policy will be for a reasonable
period ahead along with the conditions for sustaining it. It aims to
allow households, businesses and financial markets to know what to
expect in central bank base rates for the foreseeable future. In the
current environment of low growth, high unemployment and an overhang of
capacity, central bankers hope that forward guidance will exert downward
pressure on long-term interest rates as economies recover.

Following their December 2012 meeting, US Federal Reserve policymakers announced their new policy of ‘forward guidance’.
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) said it forecast that a target
range for the federal funds rate of 0-0.25% will be kept for as long as
the unemployment rate remained above 6.5%, inflation between one and
two years ahead rose no more than 50bp above the FOMC’s target of 2% a
year, and longer-term inflation expectations remained ‘well anchored’.
The FOMC reckoned that this meant the federal funds rate would be
unchanged at least through mid-2015. The thresholds for unemployment and
inflation were not trigger points for an immediate change of policy,
but points when the FOMC would consider its options.

More recently, the European Central Bank has adopted its variation on
‘forward guidance’. In July, its governing council said it expected to
keep its refinancing and deposit rates at present levels ‘for an
extended period of time’, assuming it was right in its forecast of
subdued inflation, weakness in the Eurozone economy and low credit
growth.

And only last week, the Bank of England (BoE) joined the party, when
its new governor, Mark Carney, former governor at the Bank of Canada,
made his first monetary statement and announced that the BoE would
introduce forward guidance too. The BoE followed
the Fed, as usual, in almost exactly the same terms of guidance. It
pledged to keep its base rate at its lowest level in its 300-year
history until unemployment falls to 7% from its current level of 7.8%.
How long would that take? The UK’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC)
reckoned that that unemployment ‘knockout’ target would not be reached
until mid-2016 after the creation of about 750,000 more net jobs.
However the MPC couched that guidance with some caveats. If the annual
inflation rate looked like staying at 2.5% or higher in the medium-term,
or if inflation expectations were out of control, or if the policy was
threatening financial stability, then interest-rate policy could change
earlier.

The reality is that ‘forward guidance’ from central banks is to the
blind capitalist investor is being done by blind guide dogs. Neither
Bernanke nor Carney have any idea where unemployment, GDP growth and
inflation will be next year, let alone in two or three years time. The
efficacy of this new policy is thus shot through with holes.

Forward guidance is really an addition to quantitative easing (QE),
the policy of the central bank buying financial assets, like government
or corporate bonds and printing the money to do so. The idea is that
with interest rates already near zero, the only way for the central bank
to stimulate the capitalist economy is to boost the quantity of money
rather than lower its price (interest rate). But QE is based on a
fallacy that increasing supply of money can lower its cost or price, in
other words, the price of money can be set exogenously to the
transactions made by banks and other lenders and borrowers of money and
credit. Actually, the demand for money is endogenously, by the
decisions of capitalists to invest and consumers to buy (see my posts, http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2013/06/26/the-failure-of-qe-2/ and http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/08/25/qe-uk-banks-and-the-economy/).

While investment remains low and consumption is muted, the demand for
more money is low. So all that happens to this supply of ‘liquidity’
is that it flows into the purchase of financial assets and property, the
unproductive sectors of the economy. So the stock market is booms and
house prices inflate, while the real economy stays weak. A recent paper
by Vasco Curdia and Andrea Ferrero at the Federal Reserve Bank of San
Francisco (Efficacy of QE)
found that the Fed’s QE measures from 2010 had helped to boost real GDP
growth by just 0.13 percentage points and the bulk of this ‘boost’ was
thanks to forward guidance, namely convincing investors that interest
rates were not going to rise. If that factor had been left out, the US
real GDP would have risen only 0.04 per cent as a result of QE.

So if QE continues and interest rates are kept low until 2016 as
Carney and Bernanke plan, then any boom will take place in property and
the stock market not the real economy. Already we have seen a sharp
rise in home prices in both the US and the UK in the last year.

The UK’s consumer price inflation has always been higher than in the
rest of Europe, partly because the UK is a rentier, service economy,
with monopoly companies in many key sectors, which have pricing power,
while pro-capitalist governments have raised indirect tax rates in many
sectors, like travel, insurance, energy. The inflation figure for July
is just out at 2.8 yoy, down slightly from 2.9% yoy in June. That’s
still way higher than Carney’s target of 2% a year. Factory gate
inflation rose at its fastest pace in six months and further rises look
set to come, with manufacturers crude oil input costs rising at their
most rapid rate in over a year.

Even more significant is the move up in house prices. The Royal
Institution of Chartered Surveyors’ monthly survey pointed towards the
biggest rise in house prices since 2006 and official data showed house
prices rising faster than inflation at an annual 3.1%. House prices in
London were racing along at 8.1%.

And this is at a time when UK average earnings from work are rising
at just 1% a year. Indeed, wages in the UK have seen one of the largest
falls in the European Union during the economic downturn. Average
hourly wages have fallen 5.5% since mid-2010, adjusted for inflation.
That is the fourth-worst decline among the 27 EU nations. Across the
European Union as a whole, average wages fell 0.7%. Only Greek,
Portuguese and Dutch workers have had a steeper decline than the UK in
hourly wages. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said that a third of
British workers who stayed in the same job saw a wage cut or freeze
between 2010 and 2011 amid a rise in the cost of living. “The falls in
nominal wages… during this recession are unprecedented,” the IFS said.

So with the biggest fall in real incomes in a generation, what does
the UK’s new governor do? He announces ‘forward guidance’ that will
mean higher house prices and bigger speculative profits for the stock
market. After doing so, Carney had a weekend off in upper-class
Oxfordshire, the British version of the US east coast Hamptons.
Apparently, according to news reports, Carney is a clubbable, “very
social” man who mixed “among the movers and shakers” of Canadian
society. Now he has joined the so-called Chipping Norton Set — the
group of powerful friends who live in Oxfordshire, including UK PM David
Cameron and members of the international media mogul family, the
Murdochs. Carney is married through his wife Diana into a family of
British aristocrats. Diana is apparently “an outspoken economist who
has written about the need to rebalance global wealth towards the
poorest!” economist who has written about the need to rebalance global
wealth towards the poorest”! A senior UK government source described
Carney as “the perfect Davos man” — referring to the annual gathering of
decision-makers in the Swiss ski resort where contacts and
smooth-talking oil big deals.

So the Fed and the BoE will continue with useless ‘forward guidance’
that will only fuel a credit boom for the rich, while inflation and
house prices spiral for the rest of us. It’s the rich leading the
blind.